Score:
72%
Available either in 10 day trial form or for immediate purchase, Notekeeper aims to offer a degree of access to your Evernote online account from your Symbian smartphone. In the absence of an official client (the Web Runtime version for S60 5th Edition was phased out a while ago), Notekeeper is by definition the best Evernote client for Symbian - but is it any good?
Version Reviewed: 1.1
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(See the links above for download of the free 10 day trial version or buying the commercial version.)
Evernote, in case you've been living under a rock and hadn't heard of it, is an online service keeping track of things you want to remember. Not to-dos, but longer pieces of content: articles, groups of paragraphs, links, photos and more. Starting with a pure text-based system, Evernote has grown considerably in the last year or so and the desktop version now includes multiple notebooks and a 'trunk' of apps and services which have plug-ins from, and to, Evernote. But the core of the service remains: you find something textual that you want to keep forever and paste it into a new Evernote.
Unsurprisingly for a modern cloud-centric app, Notekeeper is implemented in Qt, starting in three or four seconds - not bad, but you'll probably want to keep it loaded in RAM most of the time, i.e. switch away from it using your phone's Home key each time. After the initial log in to Evernote there's the obligatory swipeable view of your Evernote notes, all shown black-on-white, which isn't very power/AMOLED-friendly and, sadly, there's no setting to change this. Still, all my notes appear to be here, along with the facility to browse other Evernote notebooks, should I have any.
Rather curiously, there's a section for 'Favourites' and a corresponding facility to mark any note as a favourite - even though there's no such concept in the main Evernote service. Maybe this is a mobile affectation, to keep often-referred to notes handy?
Notes come up fine on the whole, though those with large images (below, left) present a problem since there's no scaling or zoom facility, so you have to pan around as needed. And notes with embedded images sometimes come a cropper (below, right). But both are minor software issues in the grand scheme of things and I'd expect both to be addressed in an update.
After being shut out of the world of Evernote for so long (years) on Symbian, it's simply great to be able to bring up my notes at all - and the majority are formatted perfectly, as the examples below show. You can't edit rich notes on the phone, there are just options to append text or edit the title, but it'll do me. 95% of my notes are created on the desktop, after all.
There's a good search facility, shown below, though I was somewhat confused by the way searching asked if I wanted to search all online notes as well - I thought the point of the sync system was that I had all the online notes stored now in the phone? Certainly I had set up no 'offline notebooks'... Talking of which, these exist, apparently, 'in case you face any problem' - leaving me none the wiser, all my notes seemed to be present and correct, even when setting my phone to 'offline' mode, so I'm not sure what extra facility an 'offline notebook' might offer.
Syncing seems to be somewhat erratic, I'm guessing it's every couple of hours, but it's also easy to force using the Settings dialog shown below.
It's at this point that I have to introduce another note of uncertainty - hopefully just another bug that can be addressed and not a limitation. I created a note in Notekeeper (as shown above, right, the first line of text becomes the note's title by default, rather neatly) and synced to Evernote. I then added a few more lines of text in my Evernote client on the Mac and also verified that these had made it to Evernote in the cloud. I then forced a sync in Notekeeper and... saw that it steadfastedly clung to its original version and nothing I could do would force it to update. Definitely something to be looked at by the developers.
Notekeeper's UI is, on the whole, smart and modern - I especially liked the way the app switches to a side-scrolling note list when the phone is rotated to landscape mode.
The very existence of Notekeeper is a welcome lifeline to Symbian-using Evernote fans, but as you'll gather from the glitches observed above, there's still work to be done before the application can be elevated to anywhere near 'must-buy' territory. Right now, I'd suggest you grab the 10 day trial and see if you can spot any more glitches/bugs - fire them to the developer at support@forb.in and we'll all sit back and see what happens - hopefully Notekeeper will join Gravity as a Symbian app that I install on every phone. Hopefully!
Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 11 April 2012
Reviewed by Steve Litchfield at
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